There are few areas where AI has seen more robust deployment than the field of software development. From "vibe" coding to GitHub Copilot to startups building quick-and-dirty applications with support from LLMs, AI is already deeply integrated.

However, those claiming we're mere months away from AI agents replacing most programmers should adjust their expectations because models aren't good enough at the debugging part, and debugging occupies most of a developer's time. That's the suggestion of Microsoft Research, which built a new tool called debug-gym to test and improve how AI models can debug software.

Debug-gym (available on GitHub and detailed in a blog post) is an environment that allows AI models to try and debug any existing code repository with access to debugging tools that aren't historically part of the process for these models. Microsoft found that without this approach, models are quite notably bad at debugging tasks. With the approach, they're better but still a far cry from what an experienced human developer can do.

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Debate around how much taxes US-based streaming services should pay internationally, among other factors, could result in people paying more for subscriptions to services like Netflix and Disney+.

On April 10, the United Kingdom's Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) Committee reignited calls for a streaming tax on subscription revenue acquired through UK residents. The recommendation came alongside the committee's 120-page report [PDF] that makes numerous recommendations for how to support and grow Britain’s film and high-end television (HETV) industry.

For the US, the recommendation garnering the most attention is one calling for a 5 percent levy on UK subscriber revenue from streaming video on demand services, such as Netflix. That’s because if streaming services face higher taxes in the UK, costs could be passed onto consumers, resulting in more streaming price hikes. The CMS committee wants money from the levy to support HETV production in the UK and wrote in its report:

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European tourists who toted home bottles of water from a holy well in Ethiopia were likely hoping for blessings and spiritual cleansing—but instead carried an infectious curse and got an intestinal power cleanse.

Three people in Germany and four in the UK fell ill with cholera after directly drinking or splashing their faces with the holy water. Two required intensive care. Luckily, they all eventually recovered, according to a report in the journal Eurosurveillance.

The infections occurred in February after some of the patients reported taking independent trips to Ethiopia in January. Two of the German patients and three of the UK patients reported travel to the country, and several reported visiting a holy well called Bermel Giorgis (also spelled ‘Georgis’) in the Quara district. The German travelers and at least one of the UK travelers brought water home with them and shared it.

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Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.

When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.

Enshittification at a new scale

Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:

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The Internet might look a bit different on Android soon. Last month, Google announced its intent to make Chrome for Android a more immersive experience by hiding the navigation bar background. The promised edge-to-edge update is now rolling out to devices on Chrome version 135, giving you a touch more screen real estate. However, some websites may also be a bit harder to use.

Moving from button to gesture navigation reduced the amount of screen real estate devoted to the system UI, which leaves more room for apps. Google's move to a "dynamic bottom bar" in Chrome creates even more space for web content. When this feature shows up, the pages you visit will be able to draw all the way to the bottom of the screen instead of stopping at the navigation area, which Google calls the "chin."

Credit: Google

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Radio signal broadcasts have their usefulness, but they eventually end (except, perhaps, for SETI). Every so often, we mark the public end of a once-essential wavelength, such as 3G cellular, analog television, or the Canadian time check. One of the most weirdly useful signals will soon end in the United Kingdom, with notable consequences if its transition is not properly handled.

Beginning in the early 1980s, UK homes could have electrical meters installed with a radio teleswitch attached. These switches listened for a 198 kHz signal from the BBC's Radio 4 Long Wave service, primarily broadcast from the powerful Droitwich Transmitting Station. These switches listened to 30 messages per minute, waiting for a certain 50-bit data packet to arrive that signaled that electricity was now at cheaper, off-peak rates ("tariffs" in the UK).

With this over-the-air notice, homes that bought into Economy 7 or Economy 10 (7 or 10 hours of reduced-price power) could make use of ceramic-stuffed storage heaters that stayed warm into the day, prepare hot water heaters, and otherwise make use of off-peak power. How the electrical companies, BBC, and meters worked together is fascinating in its own right and documented in a recent video by Ringway Manchester (which we first saw at Hackaday).

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Despite a recent pause on some tariffs, Apple remains in a particularly thorny spot as Donald Trump's trade war spikes costs in the tech company's iPhone manufacturing hub, China.

Analysts predict that Apple has no clear short-term options to shake up its supply chain to avoid tariffs entirely, and even if Trump grants Apple an exemption, iPhone prices may increase not just in the US but globally.

The US Trade Representative, which has previously granted Apple an exemption on a particular product, did not respond to Ars' request to comment on whether any requests for exemptions have been submitted in 2025.

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Kevin Peterson is a "nose" for his own perfume company, Sfumato Fragrances, by day. By night, Sfumato's retail store in Detroit transforms into Peterson's craft cocktail bar, Castalia, where he is chief mixologist and designs drinks that pair with carefully selected aromas. He's also the author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks, which grew out of his many (many!) mixology experiments and popular YouTube series, Objective Proof: The Science of Cocktails.

It's fair to say that Peterson has had an unusual career trajectory. He worked as a line cook and an auto mechanic, and he worked on the production line of a butter factory, among other gigs, before attending culinary school in hopes of becoming a chef. However, he soon realized it wasn't really what he wanted out of life and went to college, earning an undergraduate degree in physics from Carleton College and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan.

After 10 years as an engineer, he switched focus again and became more serious about his side hobby, perfumery. "Not being in kitchens anymore, I thought—this is a way to keep that little flavor part of my brain engaged," Peterson told Ars. "I was doing problem sets all day. It was my escape to the sensory realm. 'OK, my brain is melting—I need a completely different thing to do. Let me go smell smells, escape to my little scent desk.'" He and his wife, Jane Larson, founded Sfumato, which led to opening Castalia, and Peterson finally found his true calling.

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The Federal Trade Commission now has three commissioners, and all of them are Republicans.

The FTC historically had a 3–2 partisan split, with the president's party having a one-seat advantage. But President Trump fired FTC Democrats Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter last month, and the Senate yesterday confirmed Trump nominee Mark Meador to the agency's third Republican spot.

The Senate vote was 50–46 and went along party lines. "I respect Mr. Meador's qualifications and his prior experiences... But I cannot support the confirmation of any additional members to the FTC until Commissioner Slaughter and Commissioner Bedoya are reinstated," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said yesterday. "President Trump's dismissal of Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya is not only illegal; it hurts consumers and small businesses by undermining the independence of the Agency that Congress established to protect consumers from fraud, scams, and monopoly power. An independent FTC is critical for protecting consumers and has done so in a bipartisan manner for over 110 years."

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Concerns about AI's energy use have a lot of people looking into ways to cut down on its power requirements. Many of these focus on hardware and software approaches that are pretty straightforward extensions of existing technologies. But a few technologies are much farther out there. One that's definitely in the latter category? Quantum computing.

In some ways, quantum hardware is a better match for some of the math that underlies AI than more traditional hardware. While the current quantum hardware is a bit too error-prone for the more elaborate AI models currently in use, researchers are starting to put the pieces in place to run AI models when the hardware is ready. This week, a couple of commercial interests are releasing a draft of a paper describing how to get classical image data into a quantum processor (actually, two different processors) and perform a basic AI image classification.

All of which gives us a great opportunity to discuss why quantum AI may be more than just hype.

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The booming popularity of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs for weight loss has led to a flurry of companies vying to make new and improved anti-obesity medications.

One of those is Boston-based Syntis Bio, which is working on a daily pill that mimics the effects of gastric bypass—no actual surgery required. Today, the company announced early data from animals and a small group of human volunteers showing that its approach is safe and may be able to suppress hunger. The company presented the findings Thursday at the European Congress on Obesity and Weight Management.

“We're at a stage with obesity treatment where it's important for us to figure out, how do we now tune it to be more effective?” says Rahul Dhanda, Syntis Bio’s CEO and cofounder.

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This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.

This initial version of the administration's budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency's budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.

According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode seven, "Goldeneyes," which was released on April 10.

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When a cyclist sees the Trek Madone SLR 9 AXS Gen 8 for the first time, the following thoughts run through their head, usually in this order:

"What a beautiful bike."

"Damn, that looks really fast."

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Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.

The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:

• Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
• Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., "Authorization" or "all cookies for GitHub.com")
• WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
• Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
• Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into webpages and manipulate the DOM
• Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job, as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
• :: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to functionally interact with all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions)

These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.

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I recently wrote a story about the wild ride of the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last summer. It was based largely on an interview with the commander of the mission, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore.

His account of Starliner’s thruster failures—and his desperate efforts to keep the vehicle flying on course—was riveting. In the aftermath of the story, many readers, people on social media, and real-life friends congratulated me on conducting a great interview. But truth be told, it was pretty much all Wilmore.

Essentially, when I came into the room, he was primed to talk. I'm not sure if Wilmore was waiting for me specifically to talk to, but he pretty clearly wanted to speak with someone about his experiences aboard the Starliner spacecraft. And he chose me.

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Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX's blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week's Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls "kinetic launch." But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company's CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.

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OpenAI today announced a significant expansion of ChatGPT's customization and memory capabilities. For some users, it will now be able to remember information from the full breadth of their prior conversations with it and adjust its responses based on that information.

This means ChatGPT will learn more about the user over time to personalize its responses, above and beyond just a handful of key facts.

Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called "Memory" that allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger this, though it occasionally tried to guess at what it should remember, too. (When something was added to its memory, there was a message saying that its memory had been updated.)

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Remember when teachers demanded that you "show your work" in school? Some new types of AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that the "work" they show can sometimes be misleading or disconnected from the actual process used to reach the answer.

New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek's R1, and its own Claude series. In a research paper posted last week, Anthropic's Alignment Science team demonstrated that these SR models frequently fail to disclose when they've used external help or taken shortcuts, despite features designed to show their "reasoning" process.

(It's worth noting that OpenAI's o1 and o3 series SR models were excluded from this study.)

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After modest success with its first two smartwatches, OnePlus was poised to release a third-generation smartwatch early this year. Unfortunately, the company had to delay the Watch 3 from February to April, and now the previously announced $330 price tag is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the OnePlus Watch 3 has launched at an eye-watering $500 in the US, and you can probably guess why.

The OnePlus Watch 3 was all set for release a few months ago, but early reviewers spotted an embarrassing typo on the device. Like most smartwatches, OnePlus printed the watch's key specs on the bottom of the housing. Part of that text was supposed to read "Made in China," but instead, it said "Meda in China." Oops.

OnePlus delayed the launch so it could correct the mistake on retail units. However, the US-China trade relationship has deteriorated dramatically in the intervening weeks. Since the watch is meda made in China, it is subject to tariffs—the amount of Trump's China tariffs is changing on an almost daily basis, but it's currently 145 percent.

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